This Town’s Big Enough For More Blockchain Utilities

“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” is a quote that is so overused and ingrained in American culture that most people don’t know where it originated from. (The answer is Owen Wister’s 1903 Western dime-novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.)

The quote could be used to describe the current mentality surrounding blockchain applications within supply chain - a shared belief that there can only be “one” blockchain company. In reality, the potential for blockchain to change the way we do business is so great that any number of blockchain companies can coexist and collaborate in the same space. With the global blockchain market expected to be worth $20 billion by 2024, there’s plenty to go around. There are some of influential blockchain utilities coming to the forefront of supply chain. 

Tracking and transparency

A product’s journey from manufacturer to shopper is often incredibly fragmented, exchanging hands with multiple companies and carriers. The tracking process has become hard to manage at scale. The process gets even more complicated when multiple modes of transportation and their varying provisions are involved. Companies are building what they call a “Trace & Track” solution that will solve the old way by allowing “for unified tracking across the entire supply chain, between all carriers.” The shipment tracking is eternally recorded on the Ethereum blockchain or a sidechain, so there is never any question of what happened to a product or the status of an order.   

Data integrity

The FDA uses an acronym called ALCOA - attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original, accurate - to define their data integrity standards. It implies that data must be reliable and accurate for the duration of its lifecycle. Unfortunately, data integrity has become a major issue in recent years for companies, and the number of data sources one supply chain company may be drawing from puts them at serious risk for data tampering.

With blockchain, transactions via established B2B technologies like EDI and XML are updated and validated on a digital shared ledger. This means each transaction is validated by a network consensus of every trading partner involved. Each party has access to the data without any possibility of tampering, resulting in more secure data and B2B interactions. Some general blockchain providers are helping companies start their move to blockchain by providing a central environment for these established forms of B2B transactions to combine with newer blockchain engagement models.

This is part of an eight part series inspired by the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference and IBM Watson #WatsonSupplyChain #GartnerSCC #IBMFuturist

For more about how AI & blockchain will transform B2B networks, Shari Diaz did a great job explaining real blockchain applications for collaboration & unified commerce for omnichannel.

Dan is the President and CEO of CaseStack and Advisory Director to SupplyPike, and the author of Collaborate: The Art of We. You can check out Dan's Instagram.